MARCELLE HANSELAAR

RUI MATSUNAGA

NAHEM SHOA

HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND

23 August - 17 September 2016Private View1 September 6.30 - 8.30pm

Overpopulation. Climate change. Terrorism. War. There is no doubt that we live in troubled times. Scratch the shiny surface and you find anger, intolerance, exploitation and deprivation. For most of us, a combination of wilful blindness and determined ignorance allows us to continue business-as-usual, but for the three artists in this exhibition the only way to deal with the hard-core of our reality is to paint.

Although stylistically and temperamentally varied, each artist draws heavily from the Surrealist canon. They paint emotionally not logically. Like the great literary and filmic works that inspire them, they create parallel universes inhabited by peculiar characters, staple props and recurring motifs. This is dystopia, a warped reflection or surreal parody of our world; a place of extremes; not sanitised but dirty, depraved and sinister. Porn fairy tales or slash cartoons. The artists’ frankness in depicting the base and primitive lends the work an initially comic air, but the gallows humour belies a more serious intent; to show the complexities of our physical and spiritual existence. It is often in contemplating fictions that we come to understand truths.